The last of the old pay-by the night/week hotels that cater
to the down-and-outers. This type of facility is by no stretch of the imagination
a hotel or even a club, but offered a bed. I’ve never been inside the Wilson
Men’s Club but I heard that men sleep in cages made of chicken wire. That is
before there were improvements. Now I’ve heard there are walls—they just don’t
go all the way down to the floor. Cubicles.

I suppose it’s strange to miss seeing these things. I mean
shouldn’t I be glad it’s cleaner, safer (comparably). Sure! Uptown is getting an
L station re-do; it now has a Target. I don’t want to go back to the 80s when
landlord set fires and the cops were called every other night to break up
street fights.

Yet there was something authentic to the diversity that made
Uptown, Uptown.

Uptown has always had an eclectic mix of poor white, African
Americans, and Native Americans. In 1952 the Bureau
of Indian Affairs initiated its Relocation Program. Thousands of Native
Americans—with Federal promises of relocation assistance and counseling—left
reservations and moved to Chicago.
Between 1950 and 1970, Chicago’s
American Indian population grew from 775 to 6,575, according to census records.
The largest concentration was in Uptown. By the 1980s, Uptown saw an increase
of refugees escaping the killing fields of Cambodia
or boat people from Vietnam.
Southeast Asian immigrants settled on Argyle
Street. African American and Latino populations also
grew rapidly from 1960 to 1970, after being displaced because of gentrification
in Old Town
and Lincoln Park.
Also beginning in the early 1960s, an influx of patients from state mental
hospitals arrived in the neighborhood as the result of deinstitutionalization.

According to Area Chicago, an article by Alison
Fisher entitled “The Battle for Uptown” “Reporters in the early 1970s boasted
that Uptown’s diverse and ‘gutsy’ character might prove appealing to the young
and trendy, following the march of gentrification along the northern lakefront.”

Gritty and gutsy are two adjectives that certainly define
Uptown.

And since 1990 there has been a steady march of
gentrification that is slowly eroding what makes Uptown, Uptown. From the July, 2002 issue of the Chicago
Reporter, Uptown has lost 269 of its 652 Native American residents between
1990 and 2000, according to the census. Today white residents make up 42
percent of the population, up from 39 percent. There has been a rapid shift in condos
and in the first 2 months of this year the average listing in Uptown was $262,052, with the median sale $165,000. Though
not as expensive as Lincoln Park, Lakeview, or
neighboring Andersonville, according to a 2011
article in Chicago Real Estate Daily “Uptown sees decade’s biggest uptick in
home prices.”

Jump to
2013:

This snippet
from Area Chicago, article by Alison Fisher, “The Battle for Uptown.”

Uptown’s hotel buildings have long
proven stubbornly resistant to forces of gentrification, functioning as
flophouses or well-managed low-income housing run by nonprofits such as the
Lakefront SRO Corporation, and for-profit affordable housing developers like
Peter Holsten. Several buildings in the Flats stable are distressed properties
(one of the major targets of the current Alderman, James Cappleman), with
multiple building violations and reputations for crime, purchased by Michael
for as little as 20 percent of the previous owner’s debt. To his credit,
Michael is working with local housing organizations to discuss new options for
the displaced residents of his buildings. Yet, if his current plans to purchase
nine buildings in Uptown go forward, it will result in a net loss of hundreds
of units for the poorest of the poor.
There is some irony to the fact that the swinging singles “Flats lifestyle”
promoted by Michael mirrors the ideal promoted by the first developers of
Uptown hotels, including the formerly glamorous Lawrence Apartment Hotel, now a
mismanaged and decrepit property under consideration for Flats treatment. . . .
.

Flats may herald the last era of “slum
clearance” in Uptown and turn back the clock on 80 years of advocacy,
agitation, and self-determination.

Good bye diversity. And, what ever happened to that lady in
leotards at the corner of Sheridan and Wilson? She was out there rain or shine,
in snow and blistering heat. And what about that guy who used to walk around
dressed like a character out of Dickens with a dress coat, top hat, and cane
who looked a little bit like Prince?

Thursday, February 21, 2013

Summer of 2011 I received a grant from the Illinois Arts
council to attend a writer’s conference called A Room of Her Own (AROHO) at
Ghost Ranch in New Mexico.

It was a very, very encouraging time. The group of women I
met with in the afternoons gave me the confidence to go bold. The group was led
by Mary Johnson author of An Unquenchable Thirst now out in paperback. Also in
the group was Renny Golden whose latest poetry collection Blood Desert
won
the WILLA Literary Award by Women Writing the West.

One afternoon I sat in on a breakout session led by Kate Gale of
Red Hen Press where she extolled us to go bold. What do you really want?

It’s not that no one has ever asked me that—just not lately.

One of the things I wrote down as a goal was : Win a prize.

So far in 2013 I’ve had 4 pieces accepted and been paid for
2 of them. In addition I’ve been shortlisted at The Red Line. Next month at
OCWW I am schedule to teach a course on The Art of Writing Small (flash memoir) on March 14.

Without AROHO I don’t know if I would have moved forward, to
go bold.

Right now is the time to register for A Room of Her Own. If
you are looking for a supportive network and a conference just for women,
please think of applying. They are really selective, so good luck. Oh yeah, the
conference setting at Ghost Ranch is also truly inspiring—see some of my post
from 2 years ago.

Tuesday, February 19, 2013

Please check out my story here at The Red Line an on-line
journal for international writers and readers. A journal without borders.

And, oddly enough, their first call of submissions had to do
with the theme: Borders.

And, oddly enough, your truly has been shortlisted. You
cannot “vote” for me, but check out my story (Vigeland Park) here. Hint.

It is about Norway, life, death, and the human condition, told in that wry way I have. *On a personal note I have been trying to place this story for over a year. I never lost faith that it would find its audience.

Monday, February 18, 2013

In reading Aleksander Hemon’s collection of short stories
(linked?) Love & Obstacles I am at once struck by the similarities
of his bio and the presumed narrator of his stories. It is also hard to write
this review without unintentionally applying the weird angles with which Hemon
comes to the English language; I keep wanting to write in choppy tourist-ese, a
beguiling translation from an original language into what is English but
without the usual syntax and adjectives a person who has spoken English all their
life would never employ. I saved as a souvenir some tour notes a guide handed
to me before I boarded a bus in Montenegro
to go to Albania.
My husband and I in a desperate attempt to get to Albania booked a tour from a kiosk
along the beach promenade in Budva. “What do you mean you don’t want return
ticket? No one stays in Albania!”
We also declined the “adequate lunch” as we wanted to save a few Euros.

Hemon’s stories are a feast. But never too far behind the
romperous stories of youth (“passing around a cigarette, discussing, as we were
wont to, masturbation and ways to die”) is the soft-focus of The Siege of
Sarajevo. Of the number of friends he writes about, all up to “mischiefs” doing
what kids do: getting into trouble, messing around at construction sites,
trying to derail trains, pestering girls, pleasing/displeasing parents—is the
unasked question(except in “American
Commando” where Alma the interviewer asks . . .) Whatever happened to these
guys? Dead, most/some/all of them from sniper/market bombings/casualties of
war.

As someone who is mostly against war (whatever confusing
hypocrisies that “mostly” entails) the Bosnian War (but what about the Croats,
the Serbs you may ask!) whatever the war was called, a war for Independence or
a war to Preserve the Union—as a pacifist American the conflict made no sense.
And, later, traveling between Croatia
and Montenegro,
and the bits and pieces of the Yugoslav break-up, as an outsider I could
discern no real difference. Except at the border. All these different
passports, such colors, and everywhere the double-headed eagle.

In all his books Hemon has been able to ably convey that he
is a Nowhere Man, a foreigner American, new to English yet a master of the
language, an immigrant who knows us better than we know ourselves. He is a
communicator, his stories hit us in both a place we recognize and know nothing
about at all. Some call it the soul.

With his stories there is always a before with an
unmentioned after. Yet it is out there, lingering in the shadows. His stories
are thinly disguised memoir, where the “I” character is a stand-in for Hemon,
in one form or another, or perhaps he is a stand-in for a story he’d heard or
for a friend from that vanishing circle of friends. They are nostalgic in the
fullest sense of that word, warm reminisces that hide the real truth, a
fractured reality that wakes us up in the middle of a seductive paragraph.

So I checked the front matter. What? Why? Maybe like turning
over a photograph to see if the figures are identified or the event possibly
dated. The book was copyrighted 2009. And, for some reason (What? Why?) I
thought these stories were likely written before the financial crash. Before
life got hard and then real hard. Before we knew what was coming. Before we cut
back on meat or started saving ridiculous things “just in case.” Before my
parents died and before (as I read later) Hemon’s second daughter, only 1
years-old, passed away.

I enjoyed his stories very much, but cannot help imagining
what they’d feel like without the war, without loss, or even the crash. They
strike a cord that resounds with laughter in the face of grief, that despite
hardship: now is all we have.

I highly recommend Love & Obstacles, and maybe
start near the end with “American Commando” for his version of dissociation
self-revelation.

Friday, February 15, 2013

I woke up today to hear about a meteor hitting the earth.
Actually somewhere in northern Russia.
Why is it that they usually hit Siberia? Good
thing, eh.

Anyway, I wasted the better part of this morning looking at
YouTube clips of the bright streak in the sky and the sonic boom or “blast wave”
that rocked nearby towns and blew out windows.

I’ve always been interested in nightsky phenomena. Is it good luck or bad
luck to see a comet? I guess it depends on the society. Halley’s comet—the most
predictable, coming every 75-76 years and the easiest to observe with the naked
eye—throughout recorded history was either a sign the world was ending or a
time of cyclic uniqueness. In his autobiography, published in 1909, Mark Twain
wrote, “I came in with Halley’s comet in 1835. It is coming again next year,
and I expect to go out with it. It will be the greatest disappointment of my
life if I don't go out with Halley’s comet.” Twain died on 21 April 1910, the
day following the comet’s closest sweep. The last time we had a visit from
Halley’s was in 1986. I will not live to see it again.

Technically, I didn’t exactly see it in 1986 either.

I believe it was the springtime when we went out to view the comet. This was
before Internet and live blogging. For amateurs such as ourselves we had to
read the newspaper (remember those things) to figure out the optimum time to
catch a glimpse. The best time was before dawn. So sometime in the middle of
the night my friends and I decided to go comet hunting. We had to borrow a car
and what we came up with was an old shortie school bus. Next we had to pool our
change to come up with gas for the bus. Then we had to get out of the city,
away from the light pollution.

Little did we know how far we’d have to go.

We drove I-55 past the Saturn rings of the suburbs and warehouses that
ringed the city. Past the Des Plaines River, a geographic marker, which meant
we were out of Cook County and past Joliet—but
the sky was still twilight! We were running out of time looking for dark sky—soon
it would be getting light. So we took the next exit.

The road was narrow and unlit, though in the distance we could see the
ethereal glow of Chicago
and a bright light on the horizon. As far as getting out of the city, we were
definitely away from subdivisions. There was no a single house or person
around. We kept driving over broken and then dirt roads. Finally we parked. It
was now or never to see the comet.

We tramped over open ground and in the near-dark sighted a mound, more like
a heap of dirt or slag, so we climbed up for what we supposed would be a better
view. I lay down on the rough hillside next to my husband who wasn’t my husband
then. We might have been engaged. Anyway, I imagined it being romantic, lying
together watching a once-in-76-year event. We probably held hands. Slowly the
sky lightened. We didn’t spy the comet at all, but came to realize we were sitting
on a toxic waste dump right outside the Joliet Arsenal Plant.

We hurried to get back into the city before rush-hour traffic stopped us in
our tracks. We were on Lake Shore
Drive when we ran out of gas. Had we been paying
attention to the gauge we might have noticed we were running low, but back then
we were ALWAYS running on empty. Who was to say we wouldn’t make it back on
fumes? All I can remember is sitting in the right lane with traffic building
and cars honking, thinking we were going to get rear-ended at any minute. Just
as a city tow truck pulled up to get us off the roadway, my husband and another
guy returned with a plastic jug of gasoline for the tank.

We made it home, comet-less and possibly contaminated from rollicking around on
an industrial Superfund site. A few years later the arsenal closed down and was turned back to prairie and
Mike and I got married and had a baby girl with more or less all her limbs in
tack and toes and fingers accounted for. And since Halley’s, other comets have
come and gone. This memory of a crazy night out comet-watching is like a fuzzy,
white streak against a fast and far receding past. It will not come again.

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Monday, February 11, 2013

Lately I’ve taken to staying up late watching tsunami
footage on YouTube. I’m sure there’s an explanation for this. It’s been almost
10 years since that infamous Boxing Day tsunami in 2004, and it’s been about 1
year since the passing of both my parents. What do these two separate events
have to do with each other? Nothing, except loss, and trying to understand the
universe. I sit in the dark, in my cave of sorrow, waiting for that fatal wave
to wash over me.

And there is nothing I can do about it. Not a single thing
can change what happened.

The carnage and broken lives left behind after the water receded
is not quite the same as the betrayal I’ve encountered in the wake of Mom and
Dad’s death. Yet here I am, asking myself why.

Just like a tsunami, I was caught unaware. I didn’t see it
coming—just like those unsuspecting tourists gatheried on the beaches of Phuket
in Thailand.
They came out to see a phenomena, the bay suddenly emptied of water. They had
no way of knowing. That a wall of water was bearing down on them—even when it
was out there, a white crescent on the horizon. The people lining the shore had
no historical context, no perspective on which to judge the height of the wave.

I had no idea my father had written me out of his will, a
will that endowed 2 of his 4 children, with no explanation.

My father was not a man to hold grudges or keep a ledger. He
loved us all equally. There was never in my mind a premonition of preference. I
was struck, blind-sided, sucked out to sea.

So my grief is doubly bound. Not only are they gone, but I
am left with flimsy pieces, unresolved questions tossed out upon unquiet
waters.

Should I have been worried, ran, done something differently?

There are nights I go to bed and instead of praying, I
whisper to the darkness—“Dad if you see me—why?

Is there any cosmic recompense, any karmic evening up? I am
wondering.

At the end of one of the videos posted at YouTube a couple
who had lost their only daughter wiped tears from their eyes. They were alive
and she was dead. They accepted this truth. They’d decided to move on. There
wasn’t anything else for them to do. Another couple endeavored to live life to
the fullest—as if they were living for all those who’d died that day. I’d like
to do that.

Saturday, February 9, 2013

I think many of you, dear Reader(s) by now have figured out that I adore James Schuyler's poetry. For Christmas I got two copies of his Selected Poems--long story.

BlizzardTearing and tearingripped-up bits of paper, no, it's not paperit's snow. Blown side-ways in the wind,coming in my windowwetting stacked books."Mr. Park called. Hecan't come visiting today." Of course not,in this driving icyweather. How I wish I were out in it! Afigure like an ex-clamation point seenthrough driving snow.

This was from Mr. Schuyler's Payne Whitney series--Payne Whitney being a psychiatric facility on the lower East Side of Manhattan. Reading this poem I feel claustrophobic, as if I'm locked in (as James probably was when he wrote this)--probably tearing up (as in tears running down his cheeks) wishing, so wishing for a visit from an old friend, but he understands. The weather is terrible.

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Quick Bio

Jane Hertenstein is the author of Home is Where We Live: Life at a Shelter Through a Young Girl’s Eyes (picture book), Orphan Girl: The Memoir of a Chicago Bag Lady (with Marie James), and Beyond Paradise (YA fiction). See BOOKS
She has taught mini courses in memoir at the university level as well as seminars at Cornerstone Festival, Prairie School of Writing. Jane is listed on the Illinois Artists Roster. Roster Artists are certified by the Illinois Arts Council to work in public schools introducing young people to the arts. She lives in Chicago where she facilitates a “happening” critique group.